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[WoW] In which I predict shortages of tanks and healers for MoP instances

One of the new WoW features going live in the expansion is changes to how loot is doled out in quests and instances. No more need/greed rolls or eyeing quest rewards that can’t even be used by your class nevermind your spec, the future has the game doing any random loot rolls privately and offering you only rewards tailored to your character’s current spec.

Cuppy voices concerns that she wants to heal in instances but her (druid) levelling spec will be melee dps – and wonders how she can gear up for instance healing. I was wondering about that also but she notes, via Grumpy Elf, that vendors in villages will be selling gear equivalent to that area’s quest rewards to cover off-specs. (So what is the point of the quest rewards then? For the cash maybe? Don’t ask me, I only play this thing.)

I can see a similar dilemma for players who play a different role in raids than in instances. So for example I’m planning to dps in raids but happy to tank in instances if needed. At the moment, you get to roll on all the class-wearable drops regardless of your current spec, so I could queue as dps or tank, let the LFG pick what it needs most, and still roll on my preferred gear. But this new system means it would be pretty suboptimal of me to offer to tank instances while I’m trying to use them to gear up for raids; I would only get tanking drops.

(edit: No, I’m an idiot and read the Blizzard blog wrong. Quest and LFR (random raid finder) loot will be tailored for current spec, instance loot will still be on need/greed, if I read it right.)

So ignoring me being wrong, you can still use your support offspec to instance and pick up loot for your dps mainspec (or vice versa). Although I do wonder if the questing and LFR loot model will start to shape player expectations to be even more vehement about people rolling for offspec loot.

Also if you offtank or offheal in raids, for those encounters where you are playing your offspec (ie. an encounter needs an extra tank or healer), you will have zero chance for a main spec loot drop. Again, it might be smarter not to offer to help the raid out unless you don’t need any main spec drops from that boss.

I would have preferred a system that lets the player pick the loot they prefer when they queue, and allowing that to be for a different spec than the one they are currently playing.

18 thoughts on “[WoW] In which I predict shortages of tanks and healers for MoP instances”

Ugh – to me this is Blizzard building ever more complicated game systems to try and cope with the problem that some players are jerks when it comes to distributing loot. All these systems do is create ever more gaps and special cases without addressing the underlying issue. Either remove drops entirely and go to a 100% token system so players can choose their drops, or get rid of the jerks so common sense can prevail on need/greed rolls.

It was needed in LFR. Bear in mind that gearing up in regular raids is a sort of queue – if three of us are after the leather intellect belt, you can be fairly sure you’ll get it by the time the third one drops. LFR prior to the patch, though, was more like a pot luck: maybe your loot will drop and maybe you’ll roll high enough this time; and if you don’t, same again next week (because you’ll probably have 24 totally different people in the group.)

However, player expectations for loot in LFR were more aligned with normal raids, so it got pretty ugly when people started arguing with each other over who needed loot more – and, worse, when people would need on an item early in the instance with the hope of swapping it for a different item later in the run. This change basically codifies LFR as the pot luck of loot that it was, and removes the ability to cheese the system like that.

It’s already the case that gearing up a non-raiding spec in LFR was quite difficult because of the “Need Plus” system: you’d only ever get an item if no one at all rolled need (unless you got lucky with items that slipped between the cracks of Need Plus – and that’s a flaw of the old system.)

The quest reward change is a different setup, imho, and I see a bunch of ways to work around it. As well as the vendors and switching spec for handin, ISTR that the end-of-chain quests with the nice blue rewards will still offer a choice.

Absolutely. I feel as though caster/healer hybrids (like the elemental shaman or my shadow priest) are by far the most functional hybrids because they can at least use the gear from one spec for the other, even though its non optimal.

It’s certainly a concern for me. I started T11 as a healer, and had to swap to dps for Ragnaros when we needed the extra output. In T13, a tank dropped offline, so I ended up dps/tank for the first 5 months, and have only just started healing again – but was able to do so by accumulating offspec pieces during LFR. Now, there is no incentive for me to be helpful as I won’t be able to gear up my offspecs unless I queue as that spec in the first place – and given the people one finds in LFR, a kick will be immanent as soon as someone inspects my non raid gear!

You are probably correct. I’ll also predict that, despite the nostalgia for TBC gear-up and gate runs, that the forums will explode with people complaining about having to run ‘old content’ to gear a guildmate.